David Guest wrote:

> I agree that letterhead is just noise but formating is helpful for the
> mental processing of a document. ODF is now a widely accepted formating
> standard. Is it likely that HL7 will adopt that?
> 
> I also think, as Tim and I have discussed here before, that documents
> should be transmitted in two forms (a bit like an HTML email) one with
> semantic markup for machine consumption (think automatic population of
> problem list, medications, radpath) and one with display markup for
> human consumption.
> 
> David


Hi David,

the current display format options do not include it specifically, but
rtf and html are options. Html is probably the best choice as it allows
rich display and is an open standard. It would be good to try and get
broad support for html going. Then if people want logos etc they could
use external links to the images etc which would avoid bloating documents.

Currently the PMS are using rtf but unfortunately not well as they are
not escaping reserved characters in the rtf and this is quite dangerous
as if someone types a "&" or a '|' or a '^' in a document then the rtf
will be truncated. The raw rtf is also full of '\' characters and these
need to be escaped and they are not. There are so many in fact that it
is usually best to base 64 encode rtf but this is not supported.

Because of this we cannot safely deliver rtf display segments to PMS
vendors. We do have experimental code that takes correctly escaped rtf
and puts it in the message the wrong way but it seems like 2 much of a
hack to us! Basically the roadblock is the quality of the HL7. Until
compliance with standards is mandated then this roadblock will remain.

Andrew McIntyre
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